The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot released never-before-seen footage of the riot during its first hearing on Thursday.
The new footage shows rioters smashing windows and forcing their way through barricades.
“I need support,” one officer can be heard saying in body-camera footage of another officer being pushed by crowds. “We lost the line.”
The House Jan. 6 committee hearings show never before seen footage of the moments rioters broke into the Capitol building crypt. pic.twitter.com/eJtAWTZiiL
— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 10, 2022
One clip shows a rioter reading a newly posted tweet from then-president Donald Trump attacking then–vice president Mike Pence. As the rioter read the tweet over a bullhorn, some began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence.”
Representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) said Thursday that, according to testimony from former White House staffers, Trump said the supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were “doing what they should be doing.”
“This is what he told his staff as they pleaded with him to call off the mob, to instruct his supporters to leave,” Cheney said Thursday evening during the first hearing of the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot.
Cheney went on to say that the committee’s hearings will feature testimony from staffers that Trump “did not really want to put anything out calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave” and that he was yelling and “really angry at advisers who told him he needed to do something more.”
“Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment, ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it,” she said.
Cheney’s opening remarks laid out during the prime-time hearing what the committee plans to unveil in its upcoming hearings, including what she said was a “sophisticated seven-part plan” that Trump had to overturn the presidential election — though she did not immediately disclose what steps were included in that plan.
“On the morning of January 6th, President Donald Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States, despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election and in violation of his constitutional obligation to relinquish power,” Cheney said.
She went on to claim that Representative Scott Perry (R., Pa.) and “multiple other Republican congressmen” sought presidential pardons “for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.”
The committee also introduced testimony that suggested several people in Trump’s inner circle disagreed with the former president’s claims that the election had been stolen.
The hearing featured a clip of recorded testimony from ex-Trump senior adviser Jason Miller saying that the campaign’s lead data aide told Trump “in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.”
Additionally, the committee played video testimony of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, saying she “accepted” it when then–attorney general Bill Barr dismissed her father’s stolen-election claims.
Cheney said Trump did not make any calls to any U.S. governmental forces to secure the Capitol during the riot, including the Department of Justice or the National Guard. Instead it was Pence who made the calls.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified that then– White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Milley on January 6, “We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge and things are steady.”
The panel will seek to prove in its series of hearings that President Trump was directly responsible for the attack on the Capitol.
The committee closed out its first hearing by playing a video montage of rioters saying they had gone to the Capitol on January 6 at Trump’s direction.
“We were invited by the president of the United States!” one person yelled in video of the riot.
Robert Schornack, who was sentenced to 36 months probation in connection with the Capitol riot, told the panel in recorded video testimony: “Trump has only asked me for two things: he asked me for my vote and he asked me to come on January 6.”
Committee chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, unearthed a tweet Trump wrote on December 19, 2020, saying, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Thompson said the tweet “energized individuals from the Proud Boys and other extremist groups.”
He said when the panel holds its second hearing on Monday, it will “examine the lies that convinced those men and others to storm the Capitol to try to stop the transfer of power.”
Alongside previously unreleased footage from the day of the riot, Thursday’s hearing also included live testimony from a Capitol Police officer and a filmmaker who was following members of the Proud Boys the day of the riot.
The Democrat-led panel has conducted more than 1,000 depositions and interviews and plans to conduct more, according to Axios.